Udacity has passed another milestone - its 50,000th Nanodegree program graduate. Udacity also revealed that gaining a nanodegree leads to an average salary increase around the globe and 33% more in the US and Canada.

In a blog post this week Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity detailed the story of Anna Preis, who year ago knew nothing about programming or computers but having been awarded a Grow with Google scholarship for people wanting to become developers went on successfully complete the Android Basics Nanodegree program. Anna made the transition from a dead-end job she found dispiriting to now working in web development at Shopify and said:

“This completely changed my life, it’s extremely empowering!”

The Nanodegree credential was introduced by Udacity in 2014 and Anna is credited as being the 50,000-th person to graduate. Another of the 2018 graduates, of the Android Developer Nanodegree was I Programmer's Nikos Vagallis who documented his experience in a series of posts.

The blog post notes:

By the end of this year, 70,000 people from 160 countries will have graduated from Udacity Nanodegree programs. That’s up from 18,000 alumni this time last year. Like Anna, many of our students are able to attend Udacity with financial support: 12% of our graduates earned scholarships from our generous partners, including AT&T, Bertelsmann, Google, Facebook and Lyft.

It also reports:

Our alumni also get a great return on their investment: Udacity graduates who reported new jobs earn an average of 18% more after completing a Nanodegree program. In the U.S. and Canada, our students get an even bigger salary bump: 33%, on average.

Not all the Udacity news from 2018 was as upbeat. In April we reported that Udacity Withdraws Jobs Guarantee which had been extended to Nanodegree Plus graduates in the US. In August Udacity laid off about 5% of its employees, mainly from its offices in Germany. Then in October Vishal Makhijani, who was promoted to CEO in 2016 quit the company, leaving it looking for a new CEO. Since then, the board of directors and Thrun, who took over day-to-day operations, have decided to cut another 125 employees by closing its office in Brazil and slimming down departments in the US concerned with course creation.

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